more black sox players, 1924

Patrick Rock has found three more brief portraits of Baltimore Black Sox players published in the Afro-American in 1924:  Connie Day (February 22), Bill Force (February 29), and O’Neal Pullen (March 7).  I missed these the first time around.  After being alerted by Patrick, I was able to find two more, for Bob McClure (March 14) and Percy Wilson (March 21). 

 

 

The Force bio is a little scanty; the Pullen, Day, and Wilson biographies are probably sources for their entries in Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (though Wilson’s gives a birth year of 1899, rather than the 1889 in Riley).  The McClure item, however, has some new (and conflicting) information, including details about his baseball career in Texas in 1917-19, and a much earlier birthdate of March 24, 1891 (Riley has 1903).  McClure’s bio, moreover, is in the first person (“started my baseball career in Beaumont...”), a clue that most of the information in these pieces probably came from the players themselves.

Something else interesting about the McClure piece: he says he played for the “Beaumont team in the Texas League in 1917.”  Could there have been an organized Negro League in Texas then?  It so happens that a team called the “Texas All-Stars” (also referred to as the “Texas League Stars” and the “Texas Stars”) visited both Indianapolis and Chicago in late July, 1917; the team featured future Negro Leaguers Jelly Gardner in left, Edgar Wesley at first, and Henry Blackman at third.  In Chicago, host Rube Foster (himself a Texan) held a special “Texas Day” to attract migrants from the state to the American Giants’ ballpark.  (The Texas All-Stars, by the way, dropped two games to the ABCs and three to Foster’s club.)

Comments

[Gary Ashwill]

Thanks, Mischa.

[Mischa Gelman]

The NLBPA message board gives a real birthdate thanks to Wayne Stivers. See http://www.nlbpa.com/message_view.asp?imsg=3591

[Mischa Gelman]

I just realized that the Pullen birthdate can't be right. Born in 1910, serving in the army in 1918, career over by 1927? Yet it's listed in Riley straight from this account as being accurate.

BTW, Pullen seems to have been teammates with McClure in Beaumont, TX in 1917.